Smart-Lab IoT Research Platform with Modern Open Source Components

Research efforts in smart environments involves building and maintaining smart labs with a diverse range of sensors facilitate research. These are often set up with bespoke applications to meet the specific needs of the lab being designed. However, with these custom applications come bespoke problems. One of these is the engineering effort required to maintain the system and cope with change. Time spent maintaining and adapting these bespoke systems takes away from time the research they are intended to facilitate. We aimed to produce a greenfield development of the Ulster University’s smart lab infrastructure looking at the best-of-breed open source software to reduce the engineering and maintenance overhead. This paper documents the resulting setup using an open-source application stack and presents an example of its in-practice use for data collection. This work demonstrates that the open-source ecosystem has evolved such that bespoke application stacks need not be required for smart lab provisioning.